Doing his part to push the number of this year’s anti-choice bills closer to 1,000, state Rep. John Labruzzo (R-LA) introduced a radical bill to ban any and all abortions — ever. LaBruzzo amends the state’s current “feticide” law to criminalize “the killing of an unborn child” by “the mother of an unborn child,” entirely repealing the previous exception for abortion. If passed, the law — enacted to address third-party violence against a pregnant woman — would now target the woman herself and subject her to a felony charge requiring up to 15 years in jail, even if there’s a “grave risk” to the woman’s life.

A blatant attempt to turn a constitutional right into a felony requires at least a well-reasoned argument against the Roe v. Wade ruling. In defense of his bill, LaBruzzo countered the Supreme Court’s ruling with the judgment of his 4-year-old:

“I think the main difference between 1973 and now is that technology that we have. We can peer into the uterus and see an image that even my 4-year-old would say, you know, that’s a baby,” LaBruzzo said.

Incidentally, peering into women’s uteri is not the most disconcerting suggestion he’s made while in office. In 2008, LaBruzzo was so concerned that welfare costs were outpacing the number of taxpayers that he actually suggested to “pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.” Believing that those on food stamps were reproducing faster than more affluent people, he coupled this singular notion with an idea for “tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children.”

While it’s “hard” to “sit down and think of some solutions,” LaBruzzo said in 2008, “it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, he’s a racist.” He may find that, given his latest “solution” to criminalize a constitutional right, “misogynist” also rolls effortlessly off the tongue.

UPDATE

LaBruzzo recently said the inclusion of language subjecting women to “feticide” prosecution was a “mis-draft.” But as Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones notes, “It’s pretty hard to believe this language was changed accidentally.”